M.I.S.T. Campaign: Session 45

Andrew’s spell to track Imhotep led us to Duat’s first gate.  The Solar Barque stopped, briefly, there as well.  Which is fortunate since if we drift too far from it we risk being singled out as targets ourselves, instead of the focus being almost exclusively on the gods.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve certainly never shied from a fight.  But I’m smart enough to know there are forces down that are beyond our capability to handle, not the least of which is Apep.  So sticking to the vicinity of Ra and his entourage definitely sounds like the smart move.

We met Kebauet there; whom I found to be a slightly distant but altogether low-key and pleasant goddess.  I also couldn’t help but, briefly, wonder if she was on my Mother’s list.  I could see it being the kind of match she’d go for; establish ties to another underworld, pairing me with someone who has experience administrating an Underworld could prove useful since I stand to inherit one, and she’s even somewhat of an elementally-aligned Death Goddess.

But that wasn’t something I spent too much time dwelling on in Duat.  Imhotep was nearby.  And, surprisingly, wasn’t too difficult to convince to come along with us.  He didn’t’ really care that the Psedjet were on the ropes, which wasn’t really too much of a surprise.  I’d kind of seen that coming from what Kebauet had said.  And I suppose I can certainly sympathize with a sense of antipathy towards one’s native pantheon.  But he was rather quickly swayed when Andrew and I(mainly Andrew) pointed out that the Egyptian people themselves were suffering quite a bit because of the war.

Of course, since that went well it naturally meant that something else had to go wrong; which, in this instance, seemed to take the form of Titanspawn snakes following us to Imhotep.  They’re courtesy of Nyx, apparently.  The urge to just stand and fight them is, of course, there.  But this is what you’d consider a retrieval/escort mission, I suppose, not a combat one.  We need to get Imhotep back to Midgard, which means the less dangers we expose him to the better.

So we’re hoping to avoid them entirely by going up, through Kebauet’s waters.  It’s a risky proposition, for more reasons than one.  Imhotep says the time and distance of the journey will vary based on the belief of the soul, which means we’ll have to hope we don’t run into time dilation that’ll cause us to arrive after the Solar Barque has left.  Not to mention that we’re hardly traveling through regular water.  Imhotep says that we’ll emerge from it changed.

So…here’s hoping for the best.

M.I.S.T. Campaign: Session 44

Remember when I said I suspected there was another reason we were traveling with the group of Psedjet Scions that we hadn’t quite been told?

Remember when I said that sometimes I hated being right?

As soon as Cindy parted the waters of the lake, and revealed a barque with the canopic jars on it, it was obvious that we were traveling to Duat to find Imhotep instead of simply going through his tomb.  Claire insisted on steering the thing, completely disregarding my point that it should probably be done by a Psedjet, or at the very least by someone with a connection to Death.  And I won’t lie, that she was so dismissive of my concerns made it rather satisfying when some sort of light cluster arose from the barque itself and refused to let her take the helm.  She was not at all happy to be relegated to the rails.

But that, of course, isn’t the reason I hated being right (again).  While it’s by no means easy, there are more ways to get to an underworld than most people would probably expect.  By far the most dangerous is to go through the funerary practices of the ancient cultures that revered a pantheon at the peak of their worship.  It’ll definitely get you to the appropriate underworld realm easily enough.  But if you take that route and absolutely everything isn’t done absolutely perfectly you don’t get to come back.  So guess what the six Psedjet heroes have to do to get us all to Duat?

It fell to me to read the spells of Going Forth by Day, as I’m easily the most closely associated with Death of anyone in the band.  It seemed to be the most grave, solemn, thing that I’ve ever done.  I mean…I’ve put my own life on the line time and time again.  But never before have the lives of other been so inextricably and immediately dependent upon me being absolutely flawless.  But I will be a Death God, heir to an Underworld.  It’s my heritage, something I’m finally at peace with after a quarter century.  I wouldn’t allow myself to be anything but perfect.  So that’s what I was, under Andrew’s watchful gaze.  The gods of the canopic jars emerged to prepare the six souls.  They even bowed to me.  Gods, bowed to me….that still stands out as incredible even amongst everything else that was going on.

And then we were in Duat, an endless river covered in endless darkness.  Except for the Solar Barque itself, since we’d arrived at night.  And that’s a craft you can’t help but see; the figures of Horus, Set, and Ra apparent upon it at a glance.  Truly a majestic sight.  But one that has to be pushed from the mind for now.  I’ll be speaking to Horus eventually, it seems.  For now my task is to find Imhotep, and to ensure that the multi-part souls of six Psedjet heroes are able to return to Midgard.   So with Andrew’s hand on the tiller we set off across the waters of Duat…

M.I.S.T. Campaign: Session 43

The newer Scions probably would’ve been in a lot of trouble had they been there on our own.  But our foes, scorpions that moved through Earth as though it was water, weren’t at all a match for high-level demigods.  It was almost a bloodless victory on our part.  Just a scratch on one of the newer Scions because Cindy didn’t get her safely to high ground quickly enough.  But the creatures died easily enough.

Claire and Ken one-shotted one of the things a-piece.  I smoked the other three, literally.  Caught them all with a bolt of lightning.  It was…exhilarating, addictive, wielding the raw fury of the sky like that.  Almost as much as wielding the power of death had been down in the depths of Helheim.  In one instant I lit the canyon with an almost blinding flare of light, reduced our attackers to fried husks, and fused a decent-sized chunk of desert into glass (kept a chunk of that as a souvenir).

I’ve truly come to enjoy the thickening of the ichor in our veins.  And not just because we become more powerful, closer to being gods in our own right.  But because we grow ever closer to the primal forces that we wield, become capable of wielding them in new ways.  It’s intoxicating.

But I digress.  It looks like we would’ve had a group of vultures set on us almost as soon as the scorpions were finished off.  But Andrew did, well, something to ensure that nobody else would find us on the way to Imhotep’s tomb.  A relatively unassuming trick at first glance, but infinitely more important than it would first appear.  Just the sort of thing you come to expect from him. And it worked wonderfully in getting us to the tomb without any further incident.